Saturday, May 26, 2012

The Many Projects of Kirill Kryukov

Kirill Kryukov, a founding member of the CCRL and creator/maintainer of KCEC, is a man of many computer chess interests. In addition to engine testing, he has contributed much in several other areas:

1) Endgame Tablebases: Kirill is the administrator of the Endgame Tablebases subforum at CCRL and is a major contributor to the technical discussions found there. In addition, he has lead the effort to make available (via eMule) all 6 men Nalimov Tablebases. Finally, he has started to outline the technical requirements necessary for the generation of 7 men EGTBs

3) Kirr's Chess Opening Sampler is an on-line utility that provides PGNs of starting positions. As Kirill notes, books can be troublesome, in terms of avoiding using openings more than once, when conducting chess engine tests. Starting positions can be more reliable. His utility allows a user to select a specified number of positions from one of a variety of starting position suites and can guarantee a varied sampling by specifying that the same ECO code never be sampled twice. Also, you can select Chess960 positions.

4) In addition to the ratings that Kirill computes from the games played for the KCEC, he extracts other statistical information. He has tabulated the draw rate for the individual engine matches and and has determined a model for the expected draw rate given the ratings difference between two engines and also the expected draw rate given the average rating of the two opponents. Also, he has data concerning the advantage for White or Black (and the draw rate) for the openings used in the KCEC games (look here for links to the data). Other data that Kirill provides are bug reports, tendency for draws, prediction for performance against stronger and weaker opponents, ponder hit and evaluation difference, and more (all of which is linked to the Index page).

5) To complete my survey of all of Kirill's contributions to computer chess, he is also the administrator of the KasparovChess forum and the CCRL website. He is the man who is mainly responsible for all of the statistical data found at the CCRL website (he wrote the scripts that processes the games and extracts the data).